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**APRIL 17, 2023**
Kuttner on TAP
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**** Our Cracked National-Security State
The Jack Teixeira episode demonstrates the bloated incompetence that a
trillion dollars of annual military spending purchases.
You are probably wondering how a 21-year-old flaky National Guardsman
could have gotten security clearances higher than top secret. These
provided access to documents marked NOFORN. That's spy jargon for No
Foreign Distribution. The documents revealed the dreaded "sources and
methods," including details on how the U.S. spies on close allies and
how far U.S. intelligence has penetrated the Soviet military.
The short answer is a bizarre paradox: The U.S. government
overclassifies documents, lumping trivial secrets with urgently
confidential ones, but it is astonishingly cavalier about who gets
access.
This has been the case for at least half a century. And despite the
Snowden case, the Teixeira episode reveals that our national-security
state is still weirdly lax in who can see the most highly sensitive
materials. Blame bloated bureaucratic inertia.
I can testify to this from two personal experiences.
In 1966, I was a graduate student at Berkeley, studying international
political economy and specializing in the politics of Latin America. I
was also something of a radical, doing press for Bob Scheer, then an
anti-war candidate for Congress, volunteering at left-wing KPFA-Pacifica
Radio, and joining the occasional peace demonstration.
That summer, I was accepted to be an intern at the State Department. My
mother told me that some kind of agent had been asking our neighbors
questions about my loyalty. But they somehow missed my Berkeley
activities, which were hidden in plain view.
On intuition, just before leaving Berkeley for Washington, I shaved off
my full beard. When I reported to the State Department, I was given an
orientation packet marked ARA/CCA. That turned out to stand for American
Republics Area/Coordinator of Cuban Affairs. I had been assigned to the
Cuba desk!
There, I was put to work helping the chief economics officer enforce the
Cuba boycott, tastefully rebranded as a quarantine. The tasks included
reviewing CIA documents on pending shipments to Cuba from friendly
nations and working on pressure tactics to get allies to block such
shipments. These all involved top secret materials.
Personally, I did not support the Cuba boycott. But as a patriotic
American, I was both relieved at the ineptitude of the domestic spy
system that granted me a top secret clearance, and aghast that state
secrets could be entrusted to someone like me.
Fast-forward a decade. I'm working as an investigator for Sen. William
Proxmire's Senate Banking Committee. We are investigating foreign
corporate bribery and devising the legislation that became the Foreign
Corrupt Practices Act. Once again, I get access to highly classified
documents.
Senators can routinely get these, but as staff I had not been subject to
any sort of security check. I could easily have leaked these materials.
The national-security state is now so bloated and inept that it is
drowning in its own bureaucracy, overclassifying supposed secrets but
unable to safeguard genuine ones.
In a 1989 opinion piece for
**The Washington Post**
<[link removed]>,
Erwin Griswold, the former U.S. solicitor general who argued the
Pentagon Papers case for the government trying to block their
publication, switched sides. He wrote: "There is massive
overclassification ... the principal concern of the classifiers is not
with national security, but with governmental embarrassment of one sort
or another."
The report of the Commission on 9/11 warned that excessive
compartmentalization of intelligence secrets blocked interagency
communication and made the nation more vulnerable. Yet the secrets that
Teixeira got were anything but compartmentalized. A study by the
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
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pointed to some 3,000 classification
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guides inconsistently scattered across different government agencies.
The nation would be more secure if we slimmed down the national-security
establishment by about half. And think what kind of true security a
half-trillion a year could buy.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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Potential U.S. Attorney Nominee Has Demonstrated Disregard for
Constitutional Rights
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If Keva Landrum were chosen, it would serve as yet another example of
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legal system. BY EMMA MARSANO & TONI AGUILAR ROSENTHAL
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